


Texting, Phones, and Three Hundred Garridebs

by tepidspongebath



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Humor, M/M, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-26 23:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tepidspongebath/pseuds/tepidspongebath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson has been paying unusual attention to his mobile. Sherlock Holmes isn't quite sure he likes this, and Takes Steps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Texting, Phones, and Three Hundred Garridebs

**Author's Note:**

> For the johnlockchallenges' Grab Bag Challenge, filling [aspiring-dreamer's](http://aspiring-dreamer.tumblr.com) prompt: "You're texting _now_?!" and incorporates things from _The Adventure of the Three Garridebs_ of ACD canon, and passing references are made to _Cabin Pressure_ , _Doctor Who_ and _The Knightly Quest of Mervyn_ by P.G. Wodehouse. I hope it satisfies.

“You’re texting _now_?!”

Sherlock spun around, coat swirling, nose wrinkled in an expression that was mixed parts exasperation and bewilderment. John Watson was several yards behind him on the pavement, still moving, yes, but he had his phone out and most of his attention was focused on tapping out a text message. Given how much effort usually went into John’s typing, this meant he was going at a plod a turtle could easily have matched. Or even outdone.

“You’re not the only one who can text, you know,’ he said, coming to an abrupt halt.

“But we’re on a _case_!” For a few brief seconds, the consulting detective looked exactly like a toddler on the verge of stamping his foot and screaming ‘shan’t!’

“ _You’re_ on a case,” corrected John. “I’m, um, tagging along. Which is fine,” he added quickly. “Good, actually. I just need to send this.”

“Well, hurry _up_.”

A few more keystrokes. “There. Sent.”

“Good.” Sherlock turned and started striding off so quickly that John had to break into a brisk trot to keep up. “Come on, I wasted enough time looking up London goose breeders. You take the hotel, there's something I need to check in the carpark.”

John pocketed his phone and watched Sherlock disappear around the side of the building. This, he thought as he entered the small hotel's lobby, was going to be an easy one.

"Excuse me?" The bored-looking man at the reception desk gave him blank look, but John wasn't one to be cowed by hotel staff. "I'm looking for someone named Garrideb."

The man blinked. "You're kidding, right?"

"No, it's an actual name. Hang on." John took out his notebook, flicked through it to find his notes from earlier that evening. "It's G-A-R-R-"

"Yes, I know how it's spelled," said the man testily. "Only I've got about three hundred of them in here right now, all sorts. A family reunion or some such. So are you looking for a particular one, or do you just have a craving?"

 

* * *

 

“Who was it then?”

They were back in 221B after several highly profitable hours involving wrong geese and the right goose, a box of out-of-season strawberries, and far too many people named Garrideb. It was an ungodly hour – that confusing space of time that was either too late at night or too early in the morning – but they were both awake, still too wired from zipping around the city for sleep.

“Who was what?” John looked up from his laptop. He was typing up the case while it was still fresh, and while there was nothing more pressing that needed seeing to. He knew Sherlock conducted conversations erratically, somewhere in the middle of a thought, or when you weren’t there to keep up your half of it, and, while he could usually keep up, a hint was helpful every now and then.

“You were texting earlier.” It sounded almost like an accusation. Sherlock stretched in his arm chair, got up, and loped over to his flatmate. Adjusting the folds of his dressing gown, he peered at the screen over John’s shoulder.

“Oh, that. Why is that still bothering you?” John gave him a soft sort of glare, then shrugged as if it didn’t really matter. “It was just a patient.”

“A _female_ patient?”

“How clever of you to guess,” said John dryly, watching the cursor blink as he tried to come up with a title.

“It was obvious that there’d have to be some kind of incentive. You don’t usually give your mobile number to patients at the surgery. Unless you have loyalists now?”

“I would if you didn’t keep spiriting me away.” John tried to look stern and failed. His heart just wasn’t in it this time. “Well, all right, she was pretty. I told her to text if she needed anything else.”

“How subtle.”

“Don’t scoff. It worked, didn’t it?” He smiled ruefully. “Though the anything else she needed turned out to be advice because her son was running a temperature.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Sponge bath, paracetamol if the kid’s not allergic to it, and if she’s really worried, take him to the emergency room. Just common sense.”

“No diagnosis?”

“Only an idiot would diagnose somebody they’d never seen over the phone. Not that she gave me enough to go on anyway. All she said was ‘fever.’ And I think I’ve got it.” Seized by sudden inspiration, John typed a few words into the space for his entry’s title. “What do you think?”

“ _The Three Hundred Garridebs_?” Sherlock frowned. “There were two hundred and ninety-nine.”

“It’s always the details with you. Three hundred’s a nice round number. And there _were_ three hundred if you count the fake.”

“Hm.” That deep noise at the back of his throat was all Sherlock was prepared to grant in the way of concession. He went to lie down on the sofa while John read through his entry and posted it. Being Sherlock Holmes, he couldn’t help noticing that, after John turned his computer off and said good whatever-time-of-day-it-was, he took his phone with him upstairs, turning it over and over in his hand as if he couldn’t quite put it down.

 

* * *

 

It didn’t stop there. Sherlock very rarely doubted himself (and he’d never admit out loud that he did), but at first he tried to tell himself that he was just imagining things, that the texting on the Garridebs case had made him hyper-aware of John and his mobile. But after a week or so of the constant _tap-tap-tapping_ of phone keys in the background, he knew for certain that he was right about his flatmate’s texting habits. Evidence of the senses and all that. No doubt about it. John Watson was texting with unmitigated frequency.

There wasn’t any one specific recipient. Sherlock might have started to worry if there was. But, no, John seemed to text everybody actually. Patients, obviously. Sherlock himself, of course. Harry. Sarah, because of work. Lestrade, sometimes. Clients, occasionally. Stamford. The people he used to play rugby with. Bill Murray when he was in town. His therapist Ella who sometimes checked up on him. And Sherlock was genuinely surprised, when he pilfered John’s phone while the doctor was in the shower, to find a rather lengthy conversation with Molly Hooper. He’d probably be texting Anderson next, if Sherlock wasn’t careful.

To be fair, Sherlock tried to keep his nose out of it (which meant that he didn’t actively try to prevent John from texting, not that he didn’t spend a considerable amount of time keeping tabs on it), but even _he_ knew he was justified in a minor explosion of temper when he heard John at it again, even over the crack of gunfire.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Sherlock thundered as they ducked behind a convenient low garden wall. “You can’t be texting now!”

“Lestrade,” explained John, thumbs working furiously. “I don’t know about you, but I think we could use the police.”

“We’re being shot at!” Sherlock risked a peek over the wall. Nothing happened for a few seconds, so the bullet that went zinging past his head was all the more dramatic.

“Which is why I’m texting our friendly neighborhood D.I.”

“We wouldn’t be being shot at if they hadn’t heard your blasted phone!”

“It was on silent!”

“It was on vibrate,” hissed Sherlock. “And it buzzed loud enough to scare the birds in Scotland!”

“I’m sorry, all right?” John hissed right back. “And if you’d just get off my case for half a second”—he sent the message off with a decisive press of a key, pocketed his phone—“I think I can get us out of this.”

The Browning was drawn from where it had been tucked in the waist of his trousers, John peeked a few inches over the wall to look for their assailant, and a shot came, most unexpectedly, from behind. Things were a bit muddled after that.

 

* * *

 

No real damage had been done. John’s ear had been grazed, and it hurt, but since things could have hurt so much worse (or not at all, which was definitely the worst case scenario involving white sheets and slabs), he supposed he didn’t really have anything to complain about.

And it turned out that he was right about the number of real Garridebs. There were, in fact, three hundred of them. Their shooter had been an obscure cousin who had hired the fake Garrideb to take her place at a family reunion so that she (the fake one), being a burglar by profession, could empty the safe of several very valuable deeds and things to do with stocks. Since the impostor had been caught before they could split the proceeds (Sherlock’s quick work, and that goose), the real Garrideb had taken things into her own hands, though not very efficiently. They’d caught her with the papers red-handed.

John pursed his lips as he made himself tea in the kitchen. It meant he’d have to rewrite his blog – not that he hadn’t done that before – and they still hadn’t found out why the impostor hadn’t ratted on the woman who hired her. He pottered back to the living room, mug in hand, trying to finalize a message for Harry in his head. She’d seen on the news that he’d been injured in a shooting and had sent him a very worried, slightly wobbly text message, and he’d just been working on a reply.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Sherlock was perched on his armchair like an extremely alert guard dog.

 “Yeah. Thanks to you, mostly.”

Sherlock had exploded when John had been shot. He’d launched himself with surprising violence at the woman the instant the doctor went down, and had gotten her subdued (mostly terrified) long before the police arrived.

He tilted his head in acknowledgment. “She didn’t know what she was about. The gun was old, but newly bought. If she’d fired it before – which I doubt – it was at a range or at milk bottles. I think she was as surprised as you were when she learned firsthand what one of those things can do.”

“You can’t have known that before you tackled her.”

“Please.” Sherlock’s hand flicked the air in a dismissive gesture. “It was quick enough to figure out.”

“And what you told her?”

“I meant it.” Sherlock shrugged, and started to squirm slightly in his seat as if it had suddenly become uncomfortable.

“And that’s about as much as an ‘I love you’ that I’m going to get out of you, isn’t it?” John grinned. “Definitely not conventional, telling somebody that you’d have had her dead if she’d killed me. But it was good. That’s just you all over.” He went to the table and did a double take. He was sure that he’d left his phone next to the jar of dead beetles. “Sherlock,” he said warningly, “my phone. Where is it?”

“I’ve confiscated it.”

“Harry’s worrying herself sick, I’ve got to tell her I’m all right.”

 “Your mobile is a health hazard. Remember the time you didn’t see that lorry coming?”

“Christ, Sherlock, that was the one time!”

“And now there’s this.” The detective tilted his chin up in a maddeningly defiant gesture. “It’s for your own good.”

“‘For your own good’ is me hiding your cigarettes and Mrs. Hudson forcing you to eat. Taking my phone away like I was some bloody teenager…that – it defies description.”

Sherlock gave him a blank look. Sighing, John scanned the room, peeked under the day’s paper, behind the ox skull with the headphones, in the abandoned and much abused Cluedo box. He only hoped that Sherlock hadn’t gotten the inspired idea of hiding the mobile in one of his experiments.

“You could give me a hint or something,” he said, toeing a stack of photocopies. Sherlock pretended to ignore him, staring firmly at the pages of a book picked at random. “I mean, I know it’s in this room, you haven’t had the time to hide it anywhere else.” He picked up the skull, looked under it without much hope. “I’m going to find it eventually.” And, moving further along the mantelpiece, he came upon Sherlock’s phone. The man had just left it there. It was, all things considered, rather careless of him. John gave him a quick glance. He was still staring at his book.

John Watson knew he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t incandescently brilliant all the time like Sherlock, but he liked to think that he had his moments. This, he decided, as he dialed his number on Sherlock’s phone, was one of them.

For a few exultant seconds, he thought he’d got it. His phone was ringing, after all, and it was just a matter of time before he heard it. But, he remembered too late, he’d never taken his phone off silent mode. That was a definite flaw in his plan.

“Damn you clever bastard,” he said without any real venom. He hadn’t ended the call yet, still vaguely hoping for something, _anything_ , but he wasn’t going to hold on much longer. “You win. I’ll email Harry inst--”

Sherlock had shifted in his seat, and was sitting unnaturally still. And there was a faint, regular buzzing coming from his general direction. Exactly the sort of sound a phone on vibrate would make if it was sandwiched between an upholstered cushion and someone’s arse.

 “You’re sitting on it.” John was more bemused than anything else.

“And I’m not getting up.” Sherlock settled himself more firmly in the chair, gripped the arm rests to signify that John would need heavy machinery, possibly a tank, to get him to move.

“All right, stay there.” John affected an air of carelessness as he returned Sherlock’s phone to the mantelpiece, went over to his own chair. He stayed there for a while, looking at Sherlock (who returned the scrutiny tenfold), and before the detective knew what he was about, John surged forward and kissed him, right on those perfect cupid’s bow lips.

It was a soft kiss that deepened considerably when John swiped his tongue over Sherlock’s bottom lip, and the detective opened his mouth for him. There really wasn’t much else he could do. John had a wickedly clever mouth, and the things he could do with his tongue were damnably distracting.

That was exactly what the doctor intended, and he made no effort to conceal it. As he kissed Sherlock, tasting him, taking his time, his hands went under Sherlock’s jacket, spreading over Sherlock’s ribs, feeling skin through the expensive fabric of his shirt, how he moved as his breath quickened. And his hands went further down when Sherlock started to actively kiss him back, demonstrating effectively that _he_ had a clever mouth too, to the sides of his belly, over his belt (Sherlock’s hips twitched suggestively at that), then further down to his shapely rump, or rather the parts of it he could reach with Sherlock ensconced in that chair.

And then Sherlock, as if he couldn’t quite help himself, scooted forward, leaning into John (and it was nice how they fit like that), and John’s fingers closed around his mobile, hard and warm from being sat on.

John sat back, flushed and grinning triumphantly with kiss-bruised lips, phone in hand. Sherlock was practically pouting at him.

“You’d never have been able to pull that off if the Garrideb woman hadn’t shot you,” he said. He thought about this and amended it: “If I hadn’t worked myself into a state because she shot you.”It sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of drain cleaner.

“Come off it, Sherlock. Can’t you admit I got the better of you this time?” John thumbed the buttons of his phone rapidly, shooting off a message to Harry. And there were four more messages…

He frowned, lips pressed into a thin line as he weighed possibilities. “Actually, none of these are really urgent,” he said, pocketing his phone.

“No?” Sherlock, definitely not prepared to admit anything, had his chin in his hand and was glowering at the fireplace.

“No.” John slid into Sherlock’s space, cupped the back of Sherlock’s skull, threading his fingers through dark curls to make the man look at him. “I think,” he said carefully, “that they can wait a bit.”


End file.
